Pages

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Hope versus desire

I wrote last Sunday about the need to teach about absolute truths and not worry about offending doctors and bosses in order to reform the medical field. We must seek and teach the truth. Yet since most of us know the truth hurts, we tend to turn a blind eye to it. We've become apathetic enablers of the un-truth because that route is easiest. Instead we rely on HOPE! We HOPE it will get better.Yet hope is no way to lead the world into the future. Hope will die with you. It's good to have faith, yet hope will only lead a nation to destruction because those who hope are not doing. Those who hope are dreaming of a better world. Yet if there is one thing we should know as Americans is that dreams do not come true unless we act on them.Even the Bible teaches that God helps those who help themselves. Actually I think that's a quote made by some ancient philosopher and changed slightly by Ben Franklin when he wrote Poor Richard's Almanac, yet the idea has a certain truth to it. The way to prosperity is through individual effort. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that, "Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man." Hope never solved any problem. Hope traps people right where they are, good or bad. When you're hoping you are staying in your home, doing nothing, but thinking -- hoping.

There is no action with hope. There is action with desire. Desire is when you want something and you go out and get it. The founding fathers wanted freedom, and they gathered together, fearing death, and went out and sought and obtained freedom. They didn't do it by sitting at home. They did it by grabbing a pen and a gun and seeking it.

Friedrich Nietzsche's, I think, meant that when you hope you see that something is wrong and you are dreaming of a better world or a better idea. You are not happy, yet you see a world that is ideal to you and will make you happy. When you hope you are unhappy, incontent, miserable or not satisfied. You are not happy. Yet your torment continues because nothing is going to be done. Hope never changes anything.

You can do the best for your child and then hope for the best. You hope he makes the right decisions, and you hope that God helps him. Yet God also says that He will help those who help themselves. The parable of the talents told by Jesus through Matthew (25: 13-30) describes this well.If you want something, you need to take risks. God isn't going to help someone who buries his money. You need to take risks. There are risks in every thing we do, and nothing can remove the risk out of life. It's a simple fact.

So, even though you think there isn't much you can do once your child leaves the house, there is. For one, you can continue to keep contact with him, and you can continue to set a good example. You can continue to preach the truth, and you can continue to go to church or whatever good deeds you did when you were teaching your child.

You must not sit around hoping. Hope never did anything for anyone. However, by making a good effort to teach your child, you made an effort. Then, and only then, can you sit around hoping you made the best decisions and set the best examples. Only then can you sit around hoping that God watches out for your child.Hope, as used by most people, is an excuse for not trying. It's good to have hope after you've made an effort, it's good to have hope after you desire something, yet it's not good just to sit around at your homes and hope things work out. Because if that's all you're going to do nothing will ever change.Desire, on the other hand, does change things. Desire means you want something and you go out through hell or high water to seek what you are after. Desire is action orientated. Hope must come before and after desire and effort, but never should you rely on hope alone. Hope is good, but not alone.If you desire change in the medical field, for example, if you desire doctors to stop ordering needless breathing treatments, and you desire for the government and insurance companies to stop telling doctors what they have to order in order to get paid, then you have to make an effort. Desire should precede effort and hope should follow that. Yet hope alone will not solve anything. If you live on hope alone you will always wallow in misery. If you are an apathetic medical care worker because you're burned out because you think doctors are writing stupid orders, or because your hospital quality assurance or Keystone committee has created order sets, then you need to make an effort to seek and teach the absolute truth. You must make the effort, and then you can hope for the best.Another person can bring false hope. Some people want you to feel like despots, to feel miserable, to feel apathetic, and then they want to to sit around hoping things will get better some day. They want to trap you. When you are trapped you'll feel there is nothing left but hope -- false hope.Hope is an emotion. Emotions don't solve problems. You can feel sorry for someone, but hoping they make the right decisions isn't going to do any good. Hope is the bottom feeling of people who think they don't matter in the greater scope of things. Hope is the cry of those who think they have no control. Quite frankly, most people don't like not mattering, so they hope.

So you want doctors to stop ordering stupid breathing treatments, or to quit believing in that stupid hypoxic drive hoax, and so you hope that someday it gets better. Yet what did you do to create change? The people who want to defeat us, the people who want to control us, want us to sit around hoping all day. They want us to feel hopeless, apathetic, and then they have all the more power over us. They want you to feel as though your life, your job, has no meaning. Heck, how many times have you heard an RT or RN say that 90% of what we do in the medical field has no reason? Most of what we do wastes time or delays time. That's what some people in power want. They want you to hope so you have an excuse to sit around and do nothing but wine and complain. They want you to feel empty.

Say you're playing a basketball game. You can have hope that you win, but you can hope all you want because that alone won't bring about victory. If you want to win you have to have desire, and you have to act on that desire with effort, and then you have to hope you gave it your best as a team.

We must have family, faith, hope, love and charity. Yet we must also have desire and we must also have effort. To make the medical field better, to make the U.S. better, we must have hope, faith, charity, yet we must also have desire and effort.

I'm not sitting around hoping things get better. I'm not sitting around hoping the medical field gets better. I'm not sitting around hoping doctors some day stop ordering stuff that's not scientifically proven to do anything. I'm creating a better world. I'm taking action. I'm sitting here blogging. What are you doing?FacebookTwitter